Asia Contemporary Art Forum & Asia Contemporary Art Week - ACAF & ACAW

06/03/2026

Some glimpses from our inaugural “Talking Peers | A Reading Salon,” held on the rooftop of a sacred space in Chinatown on May 28. We spent the night in the company of stories, sounds, gestures of care, and shared nourishment. Emilio Rojas’s “Ahaucatl” transformed an avocado into a vessel for reckoning with histories of race, colonialism, and embodiment, while Roya Ghiasy’s “Lullllaby” opened the unsettling sound of a breastmilk pump into a meditation on care, labor, and creative practice. In another register, Dara Hartley’s “The Global Griot,” a speculative Afrofuturist food and travel zine, imagined alternate routes of cultural exchange, and Jed Kiang’s “Chainaki” brought a Taiwanese interpretation of Afghan lamb stew as an act of lineage, hospitality, and warmth. Inspired by Rachel Yoder’s “Rewilding the Kitchen,” these works together invited reflection on the kitchen as an extraordinary site of imagination, transformation, and transmission.

We are deeply grateful to all who brought their presence and generosity to this first gathering. It was a beautiful beginning. We hope you will join us for future Talking Peers salons as we continue creating spaces where artists and cultural practitioners gather around texts, lived experience, and the deeper questions shaping our creative and inner lives.

Curated by Leeza Ahmady with Amie Hollmann, in collaboration with Image Journal.

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05/23/2026

05/17/2026

05/17/2026

Among the moments that stayed with us from Talking Peers: Tea as Vessel was Emilio Rojas’s moving performance honoring and memorializing the Mexican tradition of limpia—ceremonies of cleansing and renewal carried out through herbal teas, plants, and healing essences.

Emilio invited each of us into a deeply personal act of reflection: to identify a congestion held within our bodies in relation to migration—something carried, accumulated, or left unresolved—and to consider what it might mean to release it. Through the simple yet intimate gesture of pouring herbal tea onto the artist’s dress, participants became part of a collective ritual of letting go.

The performance unfolded as a space of care and shared presence, reminding us that rituals can hold memory, grief, movement, and transformation. Long after the gathering ended, we continue to sit with the generosity of that invitation: to release what no longer serves us and create space for renewal.

05/17/2026

Among the moments that will forever stay with us from Talking Peers: Tea as Vessel activation today was Emilio Rojas’s moving performance honoring and memorializing the Mexican tradition of limpia—ceremonies of cleansing and renewal carried out through herbal teas, plants, and healing essences.

Emilio invited each of us into a deeply personal act of reflection: to identify a congestion held within our bodies in relation to migration—something carried, accumulated, or left unresolved—and to consider what it might mean to release it. Through the simple yet intimate gesture of pouring herbal tea onto the artist’s dress, participants became part of a collective ritual of letting go.

The performance unfolded as a space of care and shared presence, reminding us that rituals can hold memory, grief, movement, and transformation. Long after the gathering ended, we continue to sit with the generosity of that invitation: to release what no longer serves us and create space for renewal.

05/15/2026

Asia Contemporary Art Forum is delighted to present Talking Peers: “Tea as Vessel”, exploring tea as both medium and method. Centered on worldwide traditions of hospitality, care, and exchange, “Tea as Vessel” reflects on evolving cultures of tea consumption and considers the vessel—from teacup to thermos—as a carrier of love, joy, memory, and relation.

With special offerings by ACAF’s diasporic artist network—Roya Ghiasy, Zolaykha Sherzad, Emilio Rojas, Dara Hartley, ACAF curator, Leeza Ahmady, and ACAF Fellow Tanasia LaBrew—the gathering unfolds as a living assemblage where rituals of tea and shared presence converge across geographies, creating a site of relation, transmission, and shared imagination.

Presented as part of Damask Rose: A Gathering—a living garden of shared practices, sensory encounters, and diasporic knowledge envisioned by Bahar Behbahani.

We hope you will join us. RSVP to Attend in Bio.

Saturday, May 16, 2026 
Tea as Vessel:1:15–2:15 PM 
Damask Rose: A Gathering | 1:00–5:00 PM Liggett Terrace, Governors Island

All Images courtesy & copyright of: Zarif Atelier Kabul

05/14/2026

Venice Biennale 2026 Picks: Nalini Malani “Of Woman Born”. A Collateral Event of the Biennale Curated by Roobina Karode
“This exhibition invites us to leave behind fixed ideas of geopolitical imagination. It prompts us to ask:
For whom is history written? What would our maps, our myths, our futures look like if they were redrawn from the perspective of the vanquished who survived the horrors of war?
Of Woman Born is a newly commissioned immersive work by Nalini Malani for the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Conceptualised as an animation chamber, a form she developed since 2017, Malani draws on the Greek myth of Orestes, who kills his mother to avenge his father and is absolved by Athena, a goddess not born of a woman. Through this divine pardon, the maternal body is severed away from law and justice even as it remains the origin of life.
For Malani, this is no archaic story. It still haunts our present, when wars and occupations are justified as self-defence, and devastating violence unfolds with no true reckoning.”

05/11/2026

Venice Biennale Picks: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

05/07/2026

“Taus Makhacheva
(b. 1983, Moscow, Russia; lives and works between Dubai,
UAE, and Moscow, Russia)
Dear R., R., K., S., M., A., C., S., K.,
1., G., L., A., A., L., P., G., E., J., D.,
M., C., B., O., F., F., R., D., M., E.,
L., l., F., L., A., M., T., K., K., L., P.,
F., V., A., L., L., 2018/2026
3D-printed speakers, sound
This installation comprises 52 speakers that fill the space with
overlapping email apologies. Each speaker plays a narrated message, shaped by guilt and anxiety, opening with a range of excuses for tardiness, which accumulate into a dissonant chorus. Drawn from real emails gathered from the artist and her community, these messages include “I’m sorry for my late response, motherhood really is a full-time affair,” “Sorry for the delayed response.I was down with COVID and am only just catching up on messages now,” and “Forgive me for not writing you back sooner. I’ve lost faith in time but it seems that time has not lost faith in me.” Through this work, Makhacheva humorously reflects on a hyper-connected world in which a demand for constant communication produces exhaustion, apology, and failure. This echoes the artist’s broader exploration of how messages move, transform, and take on social consequence.”